He's well versed on the lore, explains how and when the climate on the boards changed and what affect that had in the real world. The reinvention of music through the medium of technology, electric rock ’n’ roll, became a new commodity market. Reading Dale Beran’s chronicle of 4chan, the anonymous imageboard where some of the internet’s worst scandals have been fomented, feels like scrolling through the forum itself .

Anyway, not exactly plesasurable reading but in this day and age of constant sludge a nice analysis. If an empire seems to topple overnight, it’s certain that the conditions that produced the outcome had been present for a long time—suppurating wounds that finally turned septic enough for the patient to succumb to a sudden trauma. The part in the book where he contrasts 4chan and the tumblr ecosystem was just riveting and really just helped me see things in a new way. The American countercultural revolution, the spirit of ’68 that started with the baby boomers then swept the globe, intended to remake the world into a more equitable and human-centered place.The retreat online was not just economic- the frustrations expressed by the proto-incels of /r9k/ was also the result of the impossibility of fully attaining the high standards of masculinity set by gender norms and the media these users consumed. s mutating ethos, he contends, married the victim culture of its self-labeled low-status 'beta males' to the alt-right’s prescription of white nationalism, patriarchy, and fascist power politics as a salve for the grievances of dispossessed men, culminating in a half-sincere, half-cynical embrace of Donald Trump. Part of the reason I think the book captured my interest was because I really was the demographic of young white guys and very well could have been radicalized by these neo nazi pieces of shit. He actually talked to people involved, not just founder figures like “Lowtax” Kyanka, “Moot” Poole, and Fredrick Brennan, but everyday, anonymous users of the boards. He even touches on the way that billionaires like Thiel and Mercer are dark money funders and encourages of the manipulating of chan users.

One of the themes that has been recurring in all of my reading is the power of social media in spreading ideology and misinformation, and the role of 4chan in all of this cannot be underestimated. But in the succeeding years, capitalist marketing seized upon punk with eager relish, bisecting and chopping it up into bite-size segments. Talking to Nazis like Richard Spencer, or even the boot boys, is like looking at bugs in a terrarium. Beran claims) either — but that whatever concerns those of us who do antifascist direct action may share with the stereotypical tumblr-teen, they/we didn’t get into this because they/we were mad about racist Halloween costumes.was the online hub of a leftist hacker collective known as Anonymous and a prominent supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Indulgence and toil, personal and private, self-actualization and company loyalty were all to become one.However, what I would suggest is reading Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland first, since It Came From Something Awful takes a high-powered microscope to the Petri dish of 4chan/8chan, which is only a small part of how the culture of the United States went completely bonkers, to the event horizon of irredeemability—but it is an incredibly important part, because the denizens of these sites are the true underbelly of society at large—in Japan, probably everywhere, but most destructive here in the US. is a microcosm of the internet itself--simultaneously at the vanguard of contemporary culture, politics, comedy and language, and a new low for all of the above. In fact, 4chan was home to a deep history of racism, sexism, homophobia, and generalized hate that the author fails to fully recognize. That being said, this book IS about 4Chan and the alt-right, and of all the books I've read on internet culture, this one (from my perspective) creates the most comprehensive history of the alt-right's formation and comes closest to capturing the foulness that is 4Chan. As Marcuse put it, after “true needs” such as “nourishment, clothing, [and] lodging at the attainable level of culture” were met, the industrial engines that generated these goods didn’t simply shutter their factories and declare their jobs done.